Joep Schuurkes (Posts about conferences)

Notes from the March '24 FroGS conf open space

Joep Schuurkes — Sat, 23 Mar 2024 23:00:00 GMT

Yesterday Elizabeth Zagroba, Huib Schoots, Sanne Visser and I ran another FroGS conf online open space. There were plenty of great sessions, below are some notes from the five sessions I participated in. Thank you to everyone who was there, I had a great time!

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From notes to shared documentation culture

Co-creation works for code. In what ways is co-creation for documentation different?
Why do we talk about "an audience" for documentation, instead of about "the contributors"?
The purpose of documentation flips from "what we build" to "what we built".
Old research paper on documentation: only documentation with lasting usefulness is architecture and test cases. Everything else is just notes.
Documentation heuristic: Is it easier/faster to reverse engineer it instead?
Read more… (2 min remaining to read)

Two styles of leadership in spreading context-driven testing (TITANconf)

Joep Schuurkes — Sun, 06 Sep 2015 17:56:54 GMT

The last weekend of August I spent with some great people - Kristoffer Ankarberg (@KrisAnkarberg), Kristoffer Nordström (@kristoffer_nord), Anna Brunell (@Anna_Brunell), Fredrik Thuresson (@Thure98), Maria Kedemo (@mariakedemo), Henrik Andersson (@henkeandersson), Maria Månsson, Amy Philips (@ItJustBroke), Richard Bradshaw (@FriendlyTester), Duncan Nisbet (@DuncNisbet), Alexandru Rotaru (@altomalex), Oana Casapu, Simon Schrijver (@SimonSaysNoMore), Zeger Van Hese (@TestSideStory), Helena Jeret-Mäe (@HelenaJ_M), Aleksis Tulonen (@al3ksis), Anders Dinsen (@andersdinsen) - at the awesome TITAN peer conference in Karlskrona, Sweden.

During the conference we discussed leadership and testing and on Sunday morning I got the opportunity to tell my story¹. (I do wish I had captured more of the discussion afterwards to include in this blog post.)

The first style

When thinking about my own leadership in testing, one of the first things that come to mind are my attempts to influence my colleagues at work (testers, developers, project managers) to become more context-driven in their attitude towards testing.

DEWT3 experience report

Joep Schuurkes — Sun, 28 Apr 2013 13:32:02 GMT

Last weekend the third Dutch Exploratory Workshop in Testing (DEWT3 for short) took place. The ingredients were: a very nice hotel in the woods, lots of talk about testing, beer, whiskey, a small to moderate amount of sleep, stickies and a group of fun and interesting people (You can see them here.)

On Saturday the talks (and thus discussions) were about systems thinking. A few years ago I did read Jerry Weinberg's "An Introduction to General Systems Thinking" and although a very interesting read, w.r.t. to applying it to testing I never got further then: Software is (part of) a system, so you can apply systems thinking to it. Of course, that's very much true, but it's also quite a vague piece of advice.

A primer on systems thinking

Enter James Bach, who kicked off DEWT3 with a primer on systems thinking. Systems thinking is just a way of thinking - just like logical thinking, analogical thinking, creative thinking, etc. - in which we approach a situation as being a system. So what's a system? It's a set of things in a meaningful interaction with each other. This definition raises all sorts of questions relevant in systems thinking:

Let's Test 2012 - time travel advice

Joep Schuurkes — Fri, 18 May 2012 17:32:08 GMT

If I had a time machine and could travel back in time to give myself some advice before attending Let's Test 20212, it would be this:

- Go!
- Don't worry too much about which session to attend. One of the most valuable sessions you will attend, you'll choose because it has the least appealing abstract.
- Bring your running gear.
- If you ask Rikard Edgren nicely, he will give you a dead-tree version of his 'Little Black Book on Test Design'.
- Enjoy the food. Don't worry, it's not much of a challenge.